1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to enhanced lane tracking capability of an automobile and, more particularly, to a method for diagnosing and correcting misalignment between two vision-based lane sensing systems which includes computing a correlation between the two lane sensing systems and calibrating one lane sensing system to the other before performing a fusion calculation.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Many vehicles now include lane sensing systems which employ cameras and image processing technology for determining road lane boundaries by identifying curbs and lane markings in the images. Data from the lane sensing system are typically used in a lane departure warning (LDW) system, which warns a driver of unplanned lane departures, or a lane centering (LC) system, which actively controls steering to maintain a vehicle in the center of a lane.
Some vehicles include two lane sensing systems—for example, a first lane sensing system using images from a forward-view camera and a second lane sensing system using images from a rear-view or surround-view camera. In vehicles with two lane sensing systems, a fusion or combination calculation is sometimes performed, where the fused lane data is used in the LDW system or the LC system.
However, if one of the lane sensing systems develops a misalignment problem, that misalignment will adversely affect the output of the fusion calculation, even if the other lane sensing system is perfectly calibrated. It would be desirable to evaluate and, if necessary, correct the quality of the data from the two lane sensing systems before fusing the data and providing the fused data to downstream systems such as LDW or LC.